Recreational duck shooting will remain legal in Victoria after the state government rejected a Labor-led parliamentary inquiry’s call to ban the practice.
The Allan government on Monday released its response to an inquiry that in August called for recreational duck hunting to be banned across all Victorian public and private land from 2024.
The outdoor recreation minister, Steve Dimopoulos, said the government would not change its stance on duck hunting but would introduce changes from 2025 to make the practice safer and “more sustainable”.
This year’s duck-hunting season will run for eight weeks, from 10 April.
“We accept that hunting is a legitimate activity that many thousands of Victorians enjoy and we want to make it safe and responsible and sustainable,” Dimopoulos said.
“There are many things that I don’t enjoy personally – duck hunting is one of them. But I can’t sit here and tell Victorians how to live their lives.”
He stressed the government was accepting – partially or in full – seven of the inquiry’s eight recommendations.
“There was a diversity of views in the community and there was a diversity of views within the government,” he said.
From 2025, training and testing will be mandatory for hunters and the government will boost the resources of the Game Management Authority that regulates duck hunting.
The premier, Jacinta Allan, and ministers met on Monday to thrash out a response.
The RSPCA Victoria chief executive, Liz Walker, said allowing duck and quail hunting to continue in the state would fly in the face of the inquiry’s recommendations, the government’s progress on animal welfare reforms, the clear evidence of its harms, and public sentiment.
“We urge the government to hear the millions of Victorians who have made clear their support for a duck hunting ban in Victoria and to reverse this decision,” Walker said in a statement.
Recreational duck hunting has long been banned in Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland, but is still legal in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.
On Monday, the opposition’s spokesperson for agriculture, Emma Kealy, said the decision was “common sense”.
“As we have said all along, duck harvesting is sustainable, safe and has huge economic benefits,” Kealy said.
The Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia also backed the decision.
Its Victoria hunting development manager, David Laird, said some of the recommendations would be challenging for hunters.
“But the only one that we cannot live with is a ban on hunting,” he said.
“Along with some hyped rhetoric, the inquiry did hear genuine concerns about sustainability and animal welfare. Those concerns are being addressed through key initiatives such as the adaptive harvest model and the waterfowl wounding reduction action plan.”
The Animal Justice party MP Georgie Purcell, who sat on the nine-member inquiry committee, told 3AW radio that she was “absolutely furious” at thedecision.
“You’ve just gone through a parliamentary inquiry, instigated by the government themselves, which cost taxpayers time, money and resources, only for them to turn around and ignore it. It is completely gutless,” she said.
Purcell said she would no longer support the government by providing votes as a crossbencher in the upper house.
“Now they’ll see the worst of me,” she said.
Danny Ryan from the Victorian Duck Hunters Association welcomed the decision.
“Good government considers outcomes for all Victorians, not just a very small minority of animal activists,” the former Field and Game Australia chairperson said.
“It is expected that [the] government will adopt some aspects of the select committee recommendations and hunting groups and organisations are committed and ready to work with government to assess and implement those changes.”
Other recommendations of the inquiry’s report included allowing traditional owners to continue hunting and retaining exemptions for farmers to control bird populations on agricultural land.
The Labor MP and Yorta Yorta woman Sheena Watt wrote a minority report that broke ranks with the call for an outright recreational ban, instead suggesting tougher regulations and the involvement of Indigenous people in the management of game reserves.
Despite there being no definitive evidence on wounding rates, the committee found thousands of birds were wounded each year and described it as an “unacceptable animal welfare outcome”.
